A web application is an application that is accessed over a network, such as the Internet or an intranet. The web application may be a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language (such as JavaScript, combined with a browser-rendered markup language like Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)) and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.
A web application includes a user interface (UI) having design elements that give the web application a “look and feel”. The web application UI's appearance, or “look and feel”, is sometimes referred to as a web skin. In particular, a web skin affects the way a user interface appears when a user clicks a button, but does not change the UI's behavior. A change in the web skin thus results in a change in an application's appearance, but not its behavior.
Many different web applications may be developed and implemented within a single organization. In some cases, the web applications may be developed by third parties outside of the organization. In other cases, the web application may be developed for multiple different global locations of the organization. In yet other cases, the web applications may be developed for different departments or groups with in the organization. In these cases, a consistent “look and feel” (i.e., web skin) for the web applications is important for branding purposes and a good customer experience.
A current approach to maintaining a consistent “look and feel” for web applications within an organization is to have the developer download web skin code, which includes images, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, etc. and apply that web skin to the web application. However, this solution can be problematic for many reasons. One reason is because the manual intervention by the developer, i.e., to obtain and apply the web skin code to the web application, can be time consuming and inefficient. Another reason is because the organization loses control over the application of the web skin code to the web application as this is a manual step that the web application developer should perform. In addition, the web skin code for the organization is not resistant to changes that the developed may make to the “look and feel” which could ultimately lead to inconsistencies in the overall “look and feel” presentation for the organization.